Day 18. Jan 26, 2016

After a couple of days break (hopefully the students caught up on school work) we came back together to continue working on the first iteration of our robot.

The programming team has been working on figuring out commandbase programming and getting just one motor to run using command base as a starter.

Today marked a success of that milestone. The programming team will now start implementing the drive base in the command base type environment so that when the drive is finished we can test. (this is scheduled for the end of the week)

A team was created to start working on the mechanism to scale and hang. They started prototyping something very similar to a winch. There are several other ideas floating around right now as well. We will prototype this mechanism this week and will hopefully start adding it to the CAD over the weekend.

As seen in the CAD we decided to go with the 8 wheel drive for now.

The parts were plasma cut at our sponsor – Lincoln Electric and bent using the generous support of the local FRC 3847 Spectrum!

It was a long night bending all of the drive-train and shooter parts. We had some issues bending the shooter parts as the final dimension of the width turned out to be a little wider than expected, but we realized what was wrong: we had the wrong radius bends in CAD so will change that for the next iteration. For now they will be modified to fit.

Here is some math that was done to compare our current prototype that uses CIMs and the final version that will (hopefully) use the 775pro’s (they have already been changed out from the CIMs, and just need to be tested):

The drive-train also had to be modified a little on the edges in order to be bend correctly but with a small adjustment it was bend and is ready to be put together.

The sprockets and hubs and basically a large vexpro order for the drivetrain came in today so we should be ready and have all of the parts to start assembly.